Residential Adult Education and the "Problem of Uniqueness": Newbattle Abbey College 1960-1989

Hargraves, Neil Kevin

History of Education, v40 n1 p59-82 Jan 2011

In December 2007 Newbattle Abbey College, Scotland's only Adult Residential College, celebrated its seventieth anniversary. Its survival during this relatively short span has always been contingent. Its greatest crisis occurred in 1987, when the Scottish Office announced its intention to withdraw public funding from the college. This event reveals one of the problems to have dogged Newbattle from its beginning: its relative isolation from mainstream Scottish education. Its unusual size, structure and function all made it an important addition to mainstream education provision, but they also historically caused Newbattle to be both overlooked and underfunded. Yet the campaign to save Newbattle also reveals the extent to which the ideals associated with the college continued to resonate with important sections of Scottish society in the 1980s. This paper examines the debates concerning the role of residential non-vocational education in Scotland from the 1960s to the "Save Newbattle" Campaign of 1987-1989. (Contains 141 footnotes.)